


That Deathless Death

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Incidental Time Travel, Tomione Smut Fest 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 18:04:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15954668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Someone up there had it out for Hermione Granger.Bad enough that she’d got herself trapped in the bloodyfortieswith no discernable way home. Worse still that that blasted Sorting Hat had placed her in Slytherin, thereby throwing her headlong into a nest of vipers. No, clearly the universe hadn't hadquiteenough of toying with her, which was why she was lying on her belly beneath a young Lord Voldemort's dormitory bed, praying that she wasn't about to be caught in the act of attempted theft.





	That Deathless Death

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I wrote this piece of filth for the 2018 Tomione Smut Fest for the prompt "Hermione attempts to steal from Tom." Technically it's a time travel AU, but the details of the time travel are not expounded upon, because let's be real, I wrote this for a reason, and that reason was not world building. The title was yanked from a lyric in Hozier's "Take Me to Church," but you probably knew that. 
> 
> About the dubious consent tag: Hermione consents to the sexual contact, but she initiates it as a distraction. It's a lil sketchy, so be careful.

Someone up there had it out for Hermione Granger.

Bad enough that she’d got herself trapped in the bloody  _forties_  with no discernable way home. Worse still that that blasted Sorting Hat had placed her in sodding  _Slytherin_ , thereby throwing her headlong into a nest of only-somewhat-proverbial vipers when she was at her most vulnerable. No, God or fate or even random bloody chance hadn’t had  _quite_  enough of toying with her, which was why she was lying on her belly beneath a young Lord Voldemort’s dormitory bed, praying that she wasn’t about to be caught in the act of attempted theft.

Which was why a  _hand_  had just reached beneath that bed to grope along her leg and wrap around her ankle, giving her a rather good idea of what it must’ve felt like to be a rabbit caught in a snare.

Hermione squeaked, nails scrambling for purchase against the icy dungeon floor—but  _of course_  there was no give, because the floor was made of stone, slick and unyielding and worn smooth over hundreds of years—and when the hand round her ankle gave a mighty yank, she thought, frantic,  _Please, God, I know that You probably don’t care, but please let it be Avery or Lestrange or even Abraxas Malfoy—just, please, let it be anyone but—_

There came another pull on her ankle, stronger than the first, and that was all it took: Hermione was unceremoniously dragged out from under Tom Riddle’s four-poster, the floor abrading every exposed inch of her skin as she went. A scrape was burning all along her jaw, burning hot enough that she thought she might bleed.

But when she was flipped roughly over onto her back, when she saw the face of the person who’d wrested her from her hiding place, she was forced to correct her previous thought. Whether she was going to bleed was no longer a question of  _might_ , but a question of  _when_.

Tom Marvolo Riddle was crouched over her where she lay prone and pinioned, and his wand, his wand with its phoenix feather core that was twin to Harry’s, was clenched in his fist and pointed at _her_. Bracing herself, Hermione clawed her fingers like a cornered animal, thinking that she ought to at least  _try_  and scar his obscenely pretty face before he could strike her dead.

Hermione had reflexively squeezed her eyes shut even as she’d lashed out to claw Riddle’s cheek, but the Killing Curse’s sickly green light was always bright enough to sear through shuttered eyelids, and it never came. No, there was only a rough tap against Hermione’s forehead, as though Riddle had flicked it hard with his finger, and then a warm, tingling trickle all along her spine.

Right. She’d cast the Disillusionment Charm on herself before venturing into the boys’ dormitory, hadn’t she?

Fat lot of good _that_ had done her.

More out of shock than anything else, Hermione opened her eyes to stare up into Riddle’s unreadable face. He hadn’t killed her immediately. Why  _hadn’t_  he killed her immediately? Surely he’d be getting around to it any second, now. Surely he’d only bothered dispersing Hermione’s Disillusionment Charm because he wanted to get a good look at her face before he went about killing her and stashing her body where it would never be found, not even by rats—

Arched brows knitting, Riddle finally shaped his face into an expression that Hermione could read: a frown of—bemusement? Yes, bemusement.

“Miss…Granger?” he said, in crisply enunciated tones of polite bewilderment. “What on  _earth_  are you doing in here?”

 _I wonder if that’s his natural accent_ , Hermione thought, stupidly.  _He’s from a London orphanage, isn’t he? Shouldn’t his accent be rougher than that? Probably it’s an affectation. Probably he picked it up from his posh pureblood friends._

The crease between Riddle’s brows deepened, and Hermione realized that he was still waiting on her answer because she  _hadn’t given him any_. She hadn’t given him any, because she’d been wondering whether Lord Voldemort’s natural accent was Cockney, and today was a _Saturday_ , and all the seventh year Slytherin boys should have been down in Hogsmeade—she’d watched them leave the castle grounds herself, and she’d been awaiting this opportunity for  _weeks_ , and today was meant to be  _safe_ —

“I was waiting for you,” Hermione blurted.

What? She’d been  _what_ —

If anything, Riddle’s frown only grew deeper, and Hermione would have cut off her own tongue if she’d had a knife on hand.

At least she’d had the mind to put his things to rights. At least she still had something like plausible deniability.

Riddle was still frowning, but his tone was quite polite when he said, “Were you, then? Whatever for?”

Yes, his  _tone_  was polite, but he hadn’t released Hermione’s ankle, and he hadn’t lowered his wand. He was probably working through how best to kill her, yes, but he hadn’t killed her _yet_.

That was something.

Hermione’s clawed hands were still caught in midair, so she retracted them to rest against her sternum, thinking it best not to look too combative. Her heart knocked hard against her hands, and she wondered if Riddle could feel it, too, feel her galloping pulse where he held her in place.

“I wanted—” Hermione licked her dry lips with a gummy tongue. “I wanted to talk. With you.”

God, she’d never done well under pressure. She always wound up putting too much on herself, and she always, always cracked up—

“You wanted to talk with me,” Riddle repeated, and Hermione nodded along, eyes bouncing from Riddle’s face to his wand and back again. “So, naturally, you cast a Disillusionment Charm on yourself and hid under my bed the second I entered the room?”

To be fair, she’d cast the Disillusionment Charm ages  _before_  he’d entered the room. Also to be fair, she hadn’t known that it was him; she’d only heard footsteps and panicked.

“I didn’t know it was you.” Although she was being perfectly honest, it still came out sounding like a lie, and she swore to herself. “I thought it was—Malfoy or Avery or even Professor Slughorn, and I didn’t—well, girls aren’t supposed to be in here, are they?”

“No, they’re not.” He still hadn’t lowered his wand, still hadn’t unclasped her ankle, and if all of that weren’t bad enough, his eyes had gone narrow with transparent suspicion. “Which is why you had better give me a more thorough explanation than ‘I wanted to talk with you’ if you don’t want me to take House points.”

Hermione very nearly laughed. As if she gave a damn about Slytherin’s running for the House Cup—as if she’d have cared if it were  _Gryffindor_ House points on the line, when her only present concern was whether she’d be permitted to continue breathing.

But then the impulse to laugh was drowned out by a rising wave of—irritation? She was  _irritated_  with the adolescent Dark Lord, as if he were just another teenage boy who’d tried her patience by mocking her hair or interrupting her studies.

“Yes, well,” she said, clinging to that inexplicably mundane emotion as she might a lifeline, and her voice came out steadier for it. “I’ll explain myself properly once you  _let me up off the floor_.”

And it worked—Merlin, it worked, because Riddle liked to play at being the perfect gentleman, didn’t he, and he must not have been ready to abandon his act entirely. His expression flickered before smoothing out into an apologetic grimace, and he released her ankle to offer her a hand up.

“My apologies, Miss Granger,” he said, levering them both to their feet. He brushed dust bunnies off her clothes and out of her hair, but he did not, noticeably, put away his wand. “Only you startled me—I’d thought that one of the younger students had come to stir up trouble.”

Hermione ducked her head, apparently shy, and tried not to visibly shudder at Riddle’s cursory touch. Her own wand was in her dress’s pocket—would she be able to reach for it in time? What would she do if she _could_  get a hold of it?

“No,” she said, studying their shoes—Riddle’s were worn but polished, and Hermione’s were scuffed from crawling on the floor. “No, I ought to be the one saying sorry. I—I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”

Of course, she had meant to do exactly that. She could only hope that the young Tom Riddle wasn’t quite as adept at recognizing lies as his future self.

“What  _did_ you mean to do, then?” There was a trace of amusement in Riddle’s voice, and Hermione glanced up automatically—his smile was warm, but his eyes were cold as dark stones and did not match it.

They never did.

“You still haven’t told me what you wanted to talk to me about,” said Riddle, ducking his head so that a lock of his tidy hair fell free from the rest to graze his high, smooth forehead. He looked—shy. Anxious, almost, as if he were excited to talk to her but couldn’t think of what to say.

Right. That.

That was the answer, wasn’t it? Playing along with this game of his, pretending that she was stupid enough to have fallen for it.

“I wanted to apologize.” She forced the words out and hoped that their halting quality could be chalked up to her own shyness. “For reacting so coldly to your previous…advances. I never meant to hurt you.”

Riddle had been fidgeting his fingers across his wand, but now they went quite still.

Had she actually managed to surprise him?

 _Advances_ , she’d called them, but that was too unrefined a word for what Riddle had been doing from almost the first week of Hermione’s arrival in the wrong era. He’d been— _courting_  her, she supposed. Offering her his arm to escort her from class to class, holding out chairs for her, standing whenever she entered a room, even going so far as to present her with colorful bouquets of flowers that he surely couldn’t afford. Everyone thought him terribly smitten with the new girl.

Hermione knew better.

Hermione knew better, because even if Tom Riddle had been a normal boy and not a budding psychopath, still he shouldn’t have spared her a second glance. Hermione was swotty and abrasive and not particularly pretty, and boys as handsome as Riddle did not become inexplicably infatuated with the likes of her.

Not that it mattered: Riddle  _wasn’t_ a normal boy, and he could only have ulterior motives for courting Hermione. He was on to her. Somehow, he was on to her.

While Hermione had been working herself up into a tizzy, Riddle had remained silent, which wasn’t encouraging. She wanted to see and dissect his expressions, but she didn’t dare to look him in his face for too many minutes at a time—had he already mastered Legilimency at the age of eighteen? God, she hoped not.  

But at length, he said, “Is that right.”

Hermione glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, hoping that she looked more coy than cagey.

“I…couldn’t quite believe it at first, you see. Why someone like you would want…someone like me.”

Riddle tilted his head, and the gesture seemed practiced. “And why shouldn’t I want someone like you?”

Hermione’s laugh was forced. She hoped Riddle would chalk it up to the agitated nerves of an infatuated girl rather than those of a cornered thief.

“Well,” she prevaricated, “I’ve got it on good authority that I’m rather obnoxious and difficult to get along with. I’m not what most people generally look for in a partner.”

“I’m not most people,” said Riddle, and Hermione had to bite her tongue to stop herself from agreeing far too vehemently with him. “Putting that aside—I don’t understand why you couldn’t’ve told me as much down in Hogsmeade—I  _did_  ask you out on a date, after all, and you said no, so—”

Oh, bugger it.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

Sending a prayer of apology to Harry and Ron, wherever they were, Hermione strained up on her toes and kissed Tom Riddle on the lips.

It wasn’t much of a kiss, as kisses went. It was dry and fleeting and probably rather clumsy, as Hermione was out of practice and hadn’t had much experience in the way of kissing to begin with, but.

But when she pulled back from the kiss, Riddle had gone silent, and his eyes were wide and dark and  _searching_.

The balloon of hope in Hermione’s chest deflated. That wasn’t quite the reaction she’d been going for.

Because these were the nineteen forties, see, and everyone was terribly sexist—even the denizens of the comparatively progressive Wizarding world—and Riddle had been raised by Muggles, anyway, and boys didn’t like  _forward_  girls, and even if Riddle wasn’t a normal boy, he’d probably at least  _pretend_ to be disgusted with her for form’s sake—

“Sorry,” Hermione rushed out, and wondered if now was the time to beat a retreat. Was he so shocked that he’d let her go without protest? “You must think me terribly shameless, sneaking into your dormitory and doing—doing something like that. I’ll just—”

Riddle’s lips quirked.

He was  _smiling_.

Oh, no. No, no, no—

“Perhaps I like shameless,” he said, and ducked his head to press his pillow-soft mouth to Hermione’s.

Hermione’s eyes bugged in her skull, or at least that was what it felt like. Her eyes bulged, yes, and her pulse hammered, and her palms broke out in a sweat, and she probably wouldn’t’ve been able to get a proper grip on her wand even if she  _tried_ —

Riddle’s free hand caught Hermione by the hip, pinning her in place as he’d pinned her to the floor. His fingers flexed as his mouth moved gently over hers, kneading the curve of her flesh through her skirt. Something low in Hermione’s abdomen gave a treacherous twinge.

No. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to be revolted. He wasn’t supposed to actually _want_  her. And  _she_  certainly wasn’t supposed to—

She must have made a noise, muffled against Riddle’s mouth, because he drew away with a frown knit between his brows. His tongue unfurled from his mouth, pale red, and slicked across his lower lip.

Hermione’s abdomen twinged harder. She clenched her hand, nails biting at her Mount of Venus. She expected the pain to clear her head, but it didn’t.

“Sorry,” Riddle said, rubbing his thumb in circles against her hip, and, God, she wished he’d stop doing that. “I got carried away, didn’t I? I’ve probably scared you off.”

That was what he  _said_ , and his tone was rueful enough, but he didn’t look especially shamefaced, and he did not unclasp her hip.

 _I’ve probably scared you off_ , he’d said. Scared. Yes, she was scared. She’d never been as frightened as this, not even when the basilisk had petrified her. Not even when Bellatrix Lestrange had tortured her on Malfoy Manor’s parlor floor.

Not even when the waves of time had spat her out into Tom Riddle’s Hogwarts.

Hermione took a step back, and the fingers on her hip clenched down hard before they let her go. And then she took another step, and another, until the backs of her knees hit the side of Riddle’s four-poster bed.

She sat. The mattress was luxuriously soft, as soft as the one in the girls’ dormitory where Hermione had fitfully slept for too many nights now—only the best for the spoilt purebloods, Hermione supposed. Soft beds to compensate for being made to live in freezing conditions beneath the lake.

Crossing her legs demurely at the ankles, Hermione held her hands out to Riddle. Fine but visible tremors were running from the tips of her fingers to her wrists. She wondered if Riddle had noticed. Wondered if he could see that she was shaking all over.

Wondered if he cared, or worse, if he enjoyed it.

Riddle stared at her for several beats too long, tapping his wand idly against his leg. Assessing, but assessing  _what_? If she meant it? Whether she’d run?

She wouldn’t. God, she wouldn’t, because Gryffindors didn’t run, and it  _did not matter_  that the Hat had placed her in Slytherin this time round. She wasn’t a snake, she was a lion, and lions were perfectly capable of eating snakes alive, weren’t they? Of eating them whole.

Balancing his wand carefully atop his bedside cabinet and out of Hermione’s reach, Riddle came to her, and she budged over on the mattress to make room for him. His hands cupped her shoulders and turned her in place to ease her back against the mattress and pillows, positioning her the way he might a ragdoll.

Hermione swallowed, hard, and her dry throat clicked rather painfully.

“Are you certain?” Riddle asked her. It was a whisper. He didn’t look or sound particularly passionate, but the hands on her shoulders had not eased, and he’d pressed one of his thighs between both of hers, pinning her skirt to the bed.  

Hermione nodded, because if she said _yes_  out loud, it would probably come out sounding like a lie.

It would have sounded like a lie, yes, but would it have _felt_  like one? Her pulse was pounding in her throat and her wrists and between her legs, and that didn’t feel like a lie. Her hips twitched, seeking out pressure, and the weight of his thigh gave it to her.

God, there was something fundamentally wrong with her, something sick, something weak. This was  _Voldemort_. Younger and possibly not quite as insane as the monster she’d known, but still—

Riddle’s thigh twitched where it rested between hers, but he did not kiss her again: perhaps he thought it a waste of time, a frivolous nicety now that they’d made it clear what they wanted from each other. He peeled his full lips back from his perfectly white teeth, breathed hot against her throat, and bit her on the jugular. Bit her like a striking snake. Hermione jolted from the shock of it, and her sex rode harder against Riddle’s leg. She wanted to rut against that column of muscle but was too ashamed of herself to follow the impulse through.

Not quite so ashamed, though, that she couldn’t draw up her knees and plant her feet against the mattress as Riddle continued to worry her throat with his teeth. They were sharper than they looked, those teeth, and Hermione’s skin grew sore and puffy under their touch. But she couldn’t bite him back, not from this angle, so she wrapped her fingers around his wrists and pressed her nails against his pulse points instead.

As though her grip on his wrists had reminded him that he had hands with which to touch her, and that there were better places to touch than her shoulders, besides, he shifted, hips rolling almost incidentally against her belly. His fingers scraped her as the floor had scraped her, grazing the sides of her breasts—her breathing hitched—before moving farther down to ruck up her skirt, to untangle it from where it was caught between them.

He pushed her skirt up around her waist, flipping it up high enough to expose her from navel to ankle. He released her throat and sat back on his heels, jostling the bed. His fingers traced the waistband of her white, virginal knickers, ticklish.

Hermione covered her face with her hands, cheeks and ears searing hot, but she could still feel his eyes on her. She felt his stare as tangibly as she felt his fingers when they hooked in the waistband of her knickers and drew them down her legs to catch around her ankles. His hands, warm and dry, cupped her knees to ease them apart, and Hermione let him.

What did he see when he looked at her, she wondered. How did she look to him? Was he looking at the red gash of her cunt and thinking of wounds, of blood?

Of blood, which was rushing so close to the surface of her skin that Hermione thought it might squeeze out of her pores like sweat. Of blood, which was thickening the lips of her cunt and drawing her clit into a tight, hard bead. He was just  _staring_  at her, at it, and she could feel that stare like insects crawling all along her skin, and she wished he’d just  _do_  something about that hungering curiosity of his—

He touched it. Her clit. His thumb pressed against it,  _ground_  against it, and the walls of her cunt pulsed, grew slicker. Not an orgasm. No, not an orgasm, because that tension was still building, building like she had to go to the bathroom, but, no, not quite, not quite—

Her ears were straining, and she heard the metallic  _clink_  of his belt buckle being undone, and she nearly slammed her knees shut on reflex, but she couldn’t, because he was sitting between them, and she might have been wet, but she wasn’t wet enough for  _that_ , not yet, and she was a virgin, and—

She felt the touch of his naked hips between her spread thighs, felt the smooth flat of his pelvis, felt the rough wool of his trousers scrape her tilted backside where he hadn’t pushed them all the way down, but he didn’t try and push into her. No, his cock—hard and damp and growing damper still—was pressed against the crease of her hip.  

Riddle tugged her hands away from her face and pinioned them to the bed, but he couldn’t force her eyes open.

“Look at me,” he said, right against the shell of her ear, so that it tickled.

But Hermione wouldn’t. She shook her head and screwed her eyes shut tight. Riddle’s nails bit at the insides of her wrists like he wanted to punish her for defying him. Probably he did. Probably he would.

But not just now. Now, he was rolling his hips against hers, rutting against her, cock sliding through her sweat, their sweat, so much sweat that he slipped and butted up against her open, wanting cunt instead of the hollow of her hip.

Hermione’s toes curled, dug into the mattress like hooks. The insides of her thighs were soaked, soaked with arousal and soaked with the sweat that’d made Riddle slip. His cock was cooler than her cunt, and Hermione could feel his pulse in it. Or perhaps that was her own pulse she was feeling. She couldn’t tell.

Again, he moved, and there wasn’t much friction, they were both so wet, but it was enough. The rasp of his skin against her delicate tissue was enough to wind the knot in her groin tighter, harder.

Hermione wanted to touch herself, she  _needed_  to touch herself, but Riddle wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t let up his hold on her wrists, so all she could do was hitch her knees higher and squirm against him, shameless, or at least too frantic to care about shame. She was writhing against him, against his cock, hips moving in uneven little jerks, and she couldn’t spread her legs as far as she’d like, not with her knickers haloed around her ankles. She had to, she had to, she had to—

The wide head of his cock caught, for a moment, in the crevice of her fanned cunt, and there was a brief blunt pressure like he was going to sink into her, but he didn’t. He only slipped upwards, slick and smooth, the ridged shaft of him abrading her clit.

She almost didn’t come in time. He seized up, heavy on top of her, and his hips jacked down hard, and she nearly didn’t—but she did. The nerve endings in her clit frissoned, and the walls of her cunt contracted, and her knees shook, and her feet spasmed, and her heart seized in her chest as her breath caught in her throat, as she grunted as though she was in pain—

Warmth. Warmth rushed out between her legs. Was that her come, or his? His, probably, as there was so much of it, sticky and viscous. He moaned against her throat and scratched her skin with his incisors. His hips were still twitching. So were hers.

And as Hermione came down, sweating and shaking, she thought of horcruxes, of the ring that’d disappeared over the Christmas holidays and the diary that hadn’t, the diary she’d been searching so frantically for with the intent of stealing if not destroying it—

“They’re not here, Hermione.”

Hermione went still, but not completely: her body was still pulsing with aftershocks. She opened her eyes. Stared blankly over Riddle’s shoulder. His sleeves were dark with sweat. They hadn’t even taken their clothes all the way off.  

Riddle drew back far enough to look her in the face.

 _Look at me_ , he’d said. Demanded.

“The diary and the ring, I mean,” Riddle went on, and Hermione could not find her voice. “Now, the question is—how on  _earth_  did a rule-abiding girl like yourself come to know about horcruxes?”

Funny. She’d been unbearably hot moments ago, pinned under him and tingling with a rush of blood, but now she felt as if he’d seized her round the middle and dunked her in a tub of ice water.  

Riddle’s beautiful face was flushed. His eyes were post-orgasmic and languid, but they hadn’t gone stupid and hazy as Hermione had hoped they would.

His wand was in his hand. When had that happened? And where, for that matter, had hers gone? She couldn’t feel it in her pocket.

Riddle cupped her face, tender. Her thighs were sticky with his come.

“ _Legilimens_.”


End file.
